We're All Mad Here
by PurpleMoon3
Summary: Asgard waits with baited breath, but Ragnarok doesn't come, and it never will.  Loki is the Master of his Universe.
1. Chapter 1

**We're All Mad Here**

**A Thor, Norse Mythology Fanfiction**

**Dis/claimer: Thor characters and events belong to Marvel. Norse Myths are part of the public domain, which belong to everyone (and that includes me! Ha!).**

**A/N- Born from a prompt off of norsekink on LJ that would not get out of my head. These kinkmemes will be the end of me.  
><strong>

**The prompt:**

Ragnarok doesn't come. Fenrir slips his chains, Jormungandr leaves the sea, but Ragnarok doesn't come.

Eventually Thor finds a way into the cave where Loki was being punished-and finds a blind, gibbering thing on a makeshift throne, making bizarre pronouncements to his wife and children. The God of Mischief is the God of Madness now...

**The Story:**

The bowl was steady in her hands, for she had learned patience, and moving would slosh the venom over fingers and scar the skin to the bone. She could have -should have- left. But the snake did not move, enchanted as it was, and so nor did she. Besides, Sigyn mused, all she had left was here. The remains of her child she hadn't the time to mourn anywhere but her heart, and the run-away husband that had brought ruin to everything he touched. It was madness that she stay, they said, madness that she even _cared_. Even as far down as they were, buried deep within crust of Midgard, she could hear the whispers picked up by Ratatoskr and carried by the howling winds to their cave.

"Why are you still here?" Her husband whispered, tired, refusing to look at her.

"I am your wife." She stated, frowning as the level of venom in the bowl rose. It would need to be emptied soon. She wished she'd had the presence of mind to take up a jug, or a bucket, but everything had happened _so fast_ and it was all there was at hand...

She tried not to think of her sweet Vali, transformed by an angry, rushed word, and his state of mind. Trapped in a body he did not understand, followed by guilt of an action not his own...

She repeated her statement, firm. "I am your wife." Loki had expressed his dislike of her time and again, but he had given her children, beautiful, handsome boys, and had loved them with her. He had doted on them, as much as she. Her heart ached as his prophecy came true.

"I told you they wouldn't let us keep them." Loki whispered, and as she shifted her feet, carefully moving the bowl, the bound god grew still and silent. The venom hissed more than the snake it came from as the acidic liquid trickled down his face, bubbling, gouging tracks. Sigyn dumped her bowl, carefully, and returned to her post with the assured patience of a glacier. The room smelled of rotten meat -the eternally discomposing flesh of her child- but all she could think of was the green of the serpent's dripping venom. It matched Loki's eyes. He blinked back blood and tears, focusing on her. "I am the mother of monsters. All that comes from my womb is tainted."

Sigyn felt her own eyes harden like the rocks that surrounded them. "They did not come from _your_ womb, husband."

Loki laughed, short and corrosive. It grated against Sigyn's skull. "My loins then. Every child, every one, I have ever had is a monster."

"Not mine."

"No. No they weren't." His voice turned back to a hush. "But they are, now. The Bölverkr saw to that."

They shared the silence and misery, two statues among the dark and damp. The venom came. The bowl filled. Sigyn walked away to dump it in the chasm and returned to the victim of the fates. But he never cried out. As always, there was a quiet strength to him that could not be forced. He was change, a force of nature, the bubbling stream with raging, unseen torrents underneath.

"Shall I tell you a secret, loyal Sigyn?"

"You, sharing secrets?" She bantered back, for what else was there for her to do?

He smiled, and it was brittle. "I don't want the world to end." He head rocked to the side, cheek pressed into the rock as he pouted. "My children are here." He rattled the slimy, enchanted entrails of their Narfi. "If Ragnarök comes, everyone dies. They die. Jörmungandr, Sleipnir, every one..."

"Vali." Sigyn breathed, heart screaming. Even half-mad as he was, he was still alive. Still hers. Out there, somewhere.

"Vali." Loki echoed. "I _do not_ wish to end the worlds."

"No one wants that, husband."

"Do they? Do they really? I sometimes wonder..." Loki trailed off, and as his body began to shudder Sigyn startled and checked her bowl, but no. The venom was still caught, and Loki was as fine as he ever would be in the prison. Quiet laughter. "They expect me to break free, you know, not even blood ties are indefinite."

"I expect they do."

"They wish me to seek revenge. They have foreseen it, for who would not seek vengeance for the death of their child? So it was done for Baldur, so I shall do for Narfi. So they believe."

Sigyn said nothing. She herself was within rights to seek out Thor and extract blood payment, she was the mother, but she could never best the Thunderer in combat and Loki was her husband. And her child was still here, holding his father in place, however unwilling his frozen spirit.

"Why are you still here, Sigyn?"

She closed her eyes and exhaled. "I am your wife." Arranged though it may have been. A futile attempt to chain the trickster and curb his attentions.

"My wife." He seemed to find it funny. "Am I your lord, whom you've sworn to obey?"

"Yes."

"No sane man would let this insult go unpunished." Loki whispered, and his words were heavy with something that crawled down Sigyn's back. "Drop the bowl."

Sigyn startled, and sucked in a breath as the poison damped her fingers. "What?"

"I do not wish to lead my children to their deaths. Drop. The. Bowl."

Sigyn stumbled back, the clay bowl tumbling from her hands as she did so, watching the snake wreath in something like ecstasy as it's venom soaked her husband's face. The liquid pooled over his eyes, turning a sick, puss filled yellow, and Loki twitched and whimpered. Yet he did not scream. He did not thrash in pain as expected. He keened high when the pain grew too much. Sigyn stepped back until she hit the rough wall of the cave. The broken bits of bowl sizzled in the pool of spilled venom, and she finally understood.

She mourned, tears spilling wantonly from her eyes, and beat the ground with her fists. This was why they were left unattended. One could not witness such a thing and think it _right_. Blood and pus and skin bubbled together, a cauldron of the flesh, and through it all Loki shivered limply, embracing the pain like an old lover. With no reprieve he would go mad from it. And he ordered her no reprieve...

"No sane man." She choked through her tears.

It took years -decades- but eventually he broke, and her husband's cries echoed through the chambers in a symphony.

Sigyn danced to the music, offering what comfort she could with the energy of her spirit, and with each kick of her feet the earth quaked.


	2. Chapter 2

**We're All Mad Here**

**A Thor, Norse Mythology Fanfiction**

**Part Two of Five**

The world, Asgard had come to find, ended not with a war but a whisper. Years became decades, decades became centuries, centuries became millennia, and yet still their old foe (and friend, and cousin, and _brother_ but Asgard did not linger on such epithets. They could not afford to.) did not come. Odin grew restless and worried on his golden throne, aging lifetimes over night attempting to see what he expected and not finding it. Frigga walked the battlements with half-done needlepoint, frantic and unable to remember the face of her favorite mischief maker. All of Asgard watched the horizon, expecting, until Tyr traveled down to exchange bitter taunts with his old hunting companion.

Fenris was nowhere to be found. His chains were rusted but unbroken, laying limp and empty, and the sight of them sent a wave of fear coursing through the one handed war god - but also a thread of relief. It was time, finally, he cried upon his return. The Wolf is free.

Exulted, the warriors prepared and armed themselves, won't be long now, they whispered, the Midgard serpent (and also their kinsman, but they refused to think about that) would be leaving the oceans. It would rise up and come to kill their beloved Thunderer, but not before he killed it. Bloody battles and glorious victory -or a warriors death- waited just over the horizon...

They never came. The gates remained unmolested. There was nothing to test their courage against, and empty, the Realm Eternal sat stagnant.

Eventually the Norns, those secretive mistresses of fate, were found dead.

Their throats had been torn out by a young wolf.

For the first time, facing his assembled and shining armies, the All Father had no wisdom to give.


	3. Chapter 3

**We're All Mad Here**

**A Thor, Norse Mythology Fanfiction**

**A/N- I used Valhöll instead of Valhalla because it looks magical. Yeah...**

**Part Three of Five**

For a moment, Thor thinks he is traveling through Hel. The air itself is a great weight on his shoulders, an intangible crushing pressure in the beguiling form of fog. It winds through the labyrinthine cavern following him, lapping at his heels in silent mockery. Thor's hair clings to his neck as impossibly cool sweat slides down his face, and each empty step is far more labored than it should be, but the god is on a quest of his own making and he has come too far to turn back (if it is even possible to turn back.) He may be dead, felled in the quiet of the night to a small blade or poisoned dart, never to see Valhöll. He and his warriors had watched the heavens for Naglfar, the ship of lost souls, yet it _had not come_. Why, he longed to ask, to _know_, why?

But little Skuld was found in the garden, jotun (and how could they have forgotten the heritage of the most feared and respected women in all of Asgard? How could anyone have forgotten?) blood soaking into freshly tilled earth.

Sweet Verðandi in the kitchen, an empty spool in her hand and eyes clouded as they observed the world as dispassionately in death as they had in life.

Urðr, the old, clever crone, older than even Odin, sitting trapped at her loom, silver hair worked into the warp as her blood dyed the strands dark.

There were no answers to be had, so Thor sought out the question that pulsed hot and heavy on his tongue. It took time to find the entrance, a tiny crack in the earth, and he is ashamed to think he almost missed it. An oubliette, Loki's prison was meant to be difficult to find and impossible to escape (though they always thought he would escape, eventually, escape and return with blood on his lips and murder in his mind.) Thor had been the one to hold his brother down, because no one else could get close to the trickster. The trickster. The silver tongue. Maker of Mischief. Enemy of the gods.

Odd, how so much could be pared and separated into spiteful kennings. Odd, how it was so easy to forget the bound one had once been the most free, unhampered by social niceties or tradition's chains.

Odd, how Thor remembers dragging a despairing body down these very passages (though changed by time, shaped by eons) but now all he can recall are wide green eyes (eyes filled hate, with _betrayal_) and a kitten's claws scratching at his arms.

But even kittens grow into great beasts, and Thor pauses mid-step as a tongue as sharp as any knife cuts through the mist to flay his skin from his soul. "Oooh, Thor. Mighty Thor. Brave Thor. _Terrible_ noise-um _Thor_." Sigyn stepped into his view, shadowed faced framed by limp streams of brown, wearing a glistening crown that holds a haunting familiarity. Her lips quirk as her movements, light and almost gay, bring her closer. "Dear, dear brother mine. You look surprised."

Sigyn smiled, reaching for his cheek, and Thor caught her hand with his own. "Lady Sigyn," Blood flaked like rust from her fingernails. "You are..."

"Hungry?" Sigyn asked, dancing backward and sweeping her hands through the mist. With a twist of her wrist and a burst of magic the fog quivered in her palms and transformed. She offered up hands full of dripping honey and spiced nuts. "You have traveled far, son of Odin, would that I not be remiss in my duties as host. Come, rest awhile. We are _family._"

Her words were bees stinging at the thick hide of his pride, and Thor swallowed down old guilt. She laughed at his expression, high and sharp, broken glass, and dropped the conjured sweets. They vanished back into the haze before hitting the ground, and Thor wondered if they had ever truly been. "Where is Loki, Sigyn?"

"Where is Loki?" She stopped then, proud and still as a statue, baring her teeth in a snarl. "Where is Loki? _Where_ is _Loki_? WHERE IS LOKI?"

Thor touched the hammer at his belt.

"Shhh." A new voice cautioned with the accompaniment of growls. "You shall upset father."

Hel was as terrifyingly beautiful as Thor remembered. She waltzed, smoke and ash clinging to her bare legs, with a pair of rumbling beasts guarding her flank. Eyes like the sun laughed at him from a scarred, tooth filled face, and the hair on the back of his neck stood up - an instinctual reaction to the creature destined (or so they said) to kill his father. If he struck now, if he drew his hammer and-

"Now now, _uncle_." Hel continued, blood painted lips quirking. "Is the fire in your veins so eager to taste my embrace?" She held open her arms, one soft and gold like a promise and the other the dark of dreams. "I am flattered!"

"Calm, child." Sigyn admonished, smoothing her own skirts and taking on the air of a queen. The two women were warped mirrors of each other, and wolves at their heels the same. "Why, the crown prince of Asgard is our _guest_, and it has been _so long_."

"Yes." Loki's voice, far younger than Thor remembered, banished the concealing fog to reveal a great hall hewn from the earth. "It has."

Thor looked up into the face of his brother, and found himself falling into the dark abyss of his kinsman's eyes.


	4. Chapter 4

**We're All Mad Here**

**A Thor, Norse Mythology Fanfiction**

**Part Four of Five**

Darkness, Thor had always thought, was the absence of light. Light was golden, and good, and so very much Æsir. As a child sitting at his father's knee, he had been told time and again how Asgard was the shining beacon of hope, the Realm Eternal, that sits on the uppermost branches of the World Tree as a guardian and example for all other realms. How wrong, Thor swallowed the new found knowledge with a grimace, how utterly _wrong_ that assumption had been.

Odin had hung himself from Yggdrasil, and learned the secrets of Runes. When he lost an eye, he gained wisdom.

Loki's eyes were no longer the bright, vibrant green he remembered. The green of envy, it had been whispered in the court, emeralds of jealously and poison. (The green of new sprung buds -of life- Thor used to reply.) He could have stopped her. Should have stopped her, stopped Skaði, the Jötunheimr's representative from doing more than witnessing the sly one's imprisonment. Skaði's serpent hadn't been planned, hadn't been ordained by the AllFather, but thrown in as spiteful afterthought. What had once been deliciously sweet now sat like stones in his stomach, and the entire world narrowed down to twin pools of darkness.

Within that darkness, Thor sat mesmerized, for the black wasn't a void of heat and light. It was a grand mix of _everything_. Colors blended, songs resounded, and Thor watched as entire worlds came into being and perished in endless cycles. He felt hearts beat in time with his own and the breathes of laughing children. Screaming and crying, in sadness and joy, and made Thor feel so, so small.

God of Thunder. God of a Grumbling Sky.

Was this how Loki had always seen the world?

"Are you well, brother?" Loki's childish voice called him back, back through the winding abyss of an ever-expanding universe. (Who decided to stop exploring Yggdrasil at nine worlds? Thor wanted to know. _Needed_ to know. Who, and why.)

Thor closed his eyes, and when he opened them again he avoided Loki's eyes -where Loki's eyes should have been- and forced himself to relax. To release his white-knuckled grip on Mjölnir. Loki sat on a too-large throne for such a slight form. His body was small, and achingly familiar, perched upon the stacked boulders and swamped by a protective, and equally familiar feline body that circled around, serpent-like tail dancing at his nose. The god was humming as he ran his hands over Jörmungandr's grey coat, the beast watching his prophesied killer with half-lidded eyes. Behind them, the air shimmered.

"Thor?" Loki asked, concerned, as he once did when they were children.

Thor pressed his lips together and turned to Hel. "What is wrong with him?"

Hel's eyes sparkled like her father's used to, delighting in a some secret. "Absolutely nothing, uncle." Accusations unspoken.

Loki frowned as Sigyn, swaying, approached, placing a kiss on his brow and absently stroking her step-son's fur covered head. He looked up at his wife as she carded her fingers though his hair, "Is there something wrong with me?"

"Of course not, my lord." Sigyn assured him, glaring over his head and daring anyone -anything- to challenge her. Loki sighed, content, and pulled from her embrace. Sigyn pouted, and as Loki traversed the space between himself and his brother he grew, shifting form with every step. It was liquid and smooth, a magic so perfect Thor couldn't detect the slightest ripple of excess energy, but then his brother had always been a natural. When he finally settled (after going through several shapes, as though he couldn't decide which one he wanted, which he really was) Loki stood before him with pale skin and blue veins, black hair a silent waterfall. Loki's eyeless face watched him, and his head tilted like one of the bird's whose form he was so fond of taking.

"Brother..." Because that's who he was, now, in this place and this time without spite or hate clouding the way. Thor reached out and cupped Loki's cheek, tracing his features with his thumb, afraid and ashamed that he couldn't look into his soul as he once would have. "Brother, I am-"

"When you say words a lot," Loki offered, gently steamrolling over Thor's, "they don't mean anything. Or maybe they don't mean anything at all, and we just think they do?*"

If not for Idunn's apples, Thor's heart would have stopped. There was a quite hush in the hall. Loki the silver tongue, Loki the lies-smith, declaring words meaningless? More than that: denying their brotherhood?

His brother reached up, fingers threading through Thor's hair, a look of worried panic sinking into his features. "This, this isn't _right_. You aren't _right_."

"Father-" Hel started, breaking back into their little world with a worry laced tremor.

"No. No, no, no, no!" Loki continued as he snatched his hands back, head turning from Thor to his own hands. "You aren't my brother! We don't share- we don't-"

Horrified, Thor watched as Loki shifted his teeth -only his teeth- and tore into his own wrists. The blood spouted out, rich and pungent, but it was Sigyn's dismayed scream that galvanized the thunder god into action. Thor wrapped his arms around Loki and pressed his little brother to his chest, but Loki had always been very, very good at escaping holds (though perhaps not good enough). The smaller god slipped free, passage made slick from blood still flowing, and circled around whispering a soothing mantra of how it was going to be okay. How he would make it better. Make it right. Make them _brothers_.

Once, Loki had cut Sif's golden hair, and it grew back the color of a raven's wing.

Thor struggled with wide eyes as Loki swept his weeping arms over Thor, the prince's golden hair soaking up the red like a dry sponge. "Loki, Loki, brother, Loki."

And Hel was laughing, Fenris howling, Sigyn taking her husband by the shoulder and drawing him away with soft touches and loving words as Jörmungandr's claws scrabbled over the stone. Whiskers tickled at Thor's skin, and in a numbing shock he looked down at his arm, drenched in his brother's life, and the bite taken out of it. Brothers, Loki had said, he would make them brothers.

He'd come for answers, and only received questions.

Thor sat and drew forth Mjölnir, splaying his fingers on the head, and considered.

* * *

><p>* This was a quote from Delirium of the Sandman Comics, which was a bonus round in the original prompt.<p> 


	5. Chapter 5

**We're All Mad Here**

**A Thor, Norse Mythology Fanfiction**

**Part Five of Five**

Sigyn always knew Loki, no matter what form he wore. Wolf, raven, or serpent, there was always something inside that let her know _this is your husband_. Even as a woman, long black hair tumbling down her back, Loki was Loki. The god sat cross legged on a stone bench, soaking up the warmth of the not-sun, manipulating a length of shimmering thread and humming. The entire room was lit with thin strands of gold crisscrossing the chamber as a spider's web. "Sigyn?" Loki called as her wife entered the garden like chamber. "Tell me a story?"

"What kind of story?" The sorceress questioned as she smoothed her skirts and sat beside her other half, eyes drifting to the dangerously delicate fingers dancing through an unknown pattern.

"A true story."

"But the lie is so much more interesting." Sigyn murmured, taking her comb from a pocket and running it through the locks of Loki's hair. Her husband snorted and picked at the string circling her fingers, bending forward to take a length between her teeth and pulling. Lives fell into place, forming an image the trickster could not _see_, but rather _Saw_. "Is that Thor?"

The Thread of the Fates, taken by conquest, gifted to a madman, and reduced to little more than a game of Cat's Cradle.

Sigyn gave a Cheshire grin. Her lord-husband was a true god. The power to end the world (or save it) had always been his. By birthright or by choice it had always been Loki's power. So easy, so simple, to cut the threads and end the game... but that wasn't Loki's way. The mischief maker's fingers slipped the loops of string, at once both collapsing and untangling the soul threads, and clapped her hands together. The string vanished with a pop as Loki twisted in place until she straddled Sigyn, lips curved into an impish smile. "Story?"

Sigyn laughed and gathered Loki's bangs, pinning them back with the tortoise shell comb, and touched a finger to the nearly imperceptible scars at the corner of her beloved's empty eye sockets. Deep ground rivets were acid had run off, the price paid. "No lies?"

Loki bit her lip. "Maybe... maybe a little one."

"Once upon a time," Sigyn started as her husband gave a pleased purr, "There was a city in the clouds. A wise king ruled this city, and one day a group of sisters -seers- came to see him. They warned of time and told a tale of inescapable destruction. The king gave them asylum, for they had been cast out by their own people, and in exchange they wove the future. But this kingdom was also home to a clever prince who heard the story of the sisters and denied it as did his people before him. He denied it, and saved the city. He swore blood-oaths of kinship with the king's son, and they were two kings-to-be, gods of Earth and Sky, united and strong to dash the wicked sisters against the stones.

"Filled with fire and vengeance, the red-haired prince returned to confront his father, and wielding Hammer and Spear took the throne. He cast out his people, winnowing the weak from the strong, and every day was a battle. They fought and died, only to rise again the next morning all the stronger for it..."

"And so everyone was saved." When Loki asked it was not a question, but a breath of reassurance against Sigyn's cheek.

"And so everyone was saved."

Loki's lips pressed against her, faded scars tickling her flesh, and Sigyn moaned as Loki's mouth attempted to devour hers. Deft fingers traveled along her dress, searching, as she cradled her husband's head in her hands.

Anyone could start a fight.

Much more difficult to end one.

_Fin._


End file.
